By contrast, he himself, the commander of them all, appeared so simple in his long blue frock coat--the old uniform of the Engineers--with his trousers tucked roughly into his big boots and a little cane, the only weapon he ever carried--"I am too hot tempered for any other" he would often say laughingly of himself--in his hand. This simplicity, this utter absence of affectation, was the keynote to his character--just as it was the keynote of Robert Hart's character. Because both possessed it to an unusual degree, each understood the other--and at once.
[Illustration: SIR ROBERT HART ABOUT 1866.]
Within a week of the I.G.'s arrival Gordon's fit of gloom, brought on by the affair of the Wangs, was dissipating; within two it was gone, for a character of such violent "downs" must have equally mercurial "ups"; within three he capitulated to argument and agreed to go back to Soochow and see Li. Impulsive and generous as ever, he then wished that Hart should say he (Hart) had induced him to come to Li. "That will give you immense influence with the Chinese," he declared. But Hart would not have it so; he preferred to tell Li that Gordon had come of his own free will, knowing that this would please Li personally far more.
The three-cornered meeting passed off well. As little as possible was said about past disagreements, as much as possible about future agreements, and the end of it was that Gordon agreed to take the field again. At the same time the I.G. took care to suggest the removal of an excuse for future misunderstandings in the person of an officious, inefficient interpreter whom Robert Hart himself described as a "'Talkee talkee, me-no-savey,' the sort of person whose attempt at Mandarin [official Chinese] is even viler than his English."
There then remained nothing more to do in Soochow, and Hart and Gordon started back together to Quinsan, though not before they had visited the historic Soochow stockades together, and Gordon, taking his friend over every disputed foot of ground, had vividly described the bloody fighting there--the victory so pleasant to remember, the tragedy so difficult to forget.
I doubt if anything he ever did in China gave Robert Hart greater pleasure than this reconciliation, or if there was any other single episode in his career in which he took more pride; though he spoke of it so seldom and so modestly that scarcely any one--certainly not the public--knew of what he had done. It cost him a few friends among minor officials who thought that negotiations should have passed through their hands rather than his. But his old friend Sir Frederick Bruce, to whom he wrote a report of the whole affair (afterwards included in the Blue Book for 1864), took genuine pleasure in his success, while the Chinese gratitude was unbounded; they realized very clearly what the extremity had been and the difficulty from which they had been rescued.